The record in context

By the mid-1980s, Dusty Springfield’s career had been in the wilderness for more than a decade. The seventies had brought personal struggles and commercial indifference; the early eighties had brought little more. She was living in Los Angeles, largely out of the spotlight, when two of her biggest fans — Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, the Pet Shop Boys — decided to do something about it.

Tennant and Lowe had grown up on Springfield’s records, and they wrote “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” with her voice in mind, then invited her to sing it as a duet. Released in late 1987, the single reached number two in both Britain and America — her biggest hit in over twenty years — and it did something no one had managed in a decade: it made Dusty Springfield contemporary again without asking her to be anyone other than herself.

The comeback was real and sustained. It led to further collaborations, a renewed recording career, and a final decade in which she was honoured as the legend she had always been — culminating in her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1999, just days after her death.

Listen closely

Listen first to the generational conversation in the arrangement. The Pet Shop Boys’ production is pure 1987 — synthesised, precise, ironic — and into it steps a voice from 1963, warm and human and utterly un-ironic. The contrast should not work. That it works completely is the record’s miracle: Tennant’s detached cool and Springfield’s emotional directness turn out to be two halves of the same song.

Then listen to what Springfield does with her verses. She does not try to sound modern; she sounds like Dusty Springfield, which turns out to be timeless. The famous husk is still there, the phrasing is still immaculate, and when she sings the title line — “what have I done to deserve this?” — the decades of lived experience in her voice give the synth-pop lyric a gravity its writers could never have supplied alone.

Finally, listen for the joy. However complicated the years between had been, the vocal on this record sounds like a woman delighted to be singing again — delighted, perhaps, to be wanted. Pop comebacks are usually exercises in nostalgia. This one felt like a rescue, and the rescued party knew it.

It is a fitting final chapter for this collection: the girl who debuted in 1963 with total confidence, closing the circle in 1987 with total vindication.